Last week’s seizure of a Russian high school building in the Polish capital last week caused tension as the Russian Ambassador to Poland did not rule out severing diplomatic relations with Warsaw.
The statement followed last week’s decision by Polish authorities to seize a building used for the Russian embassy’s school in Warsaw. The school’s employees were required to leave the building before the evening of 29 April.
Appearing on the Solovyov LIVE TV channel, Ambassador Sergey Andreev answered in the affirmative to a question as to whether Russian diplomats in Poland were ready at any time to pack their bags and padlock the embassy.
“Naturally, we have been ready for this for a while,” the envoy said. “I can assure you that neither myself nor my colleagues would be particularly distraught by having to leave Poland,” he added, as quoted by TASS.
The ambassador said that the Russian diplomatic mission under him was ready for any and every type of hostile action on the part of their Polish hosts and would deal with them in a calm, professional manner without any emotional excesses, being guided solely by the need to take Moscow’s interests into account.
On the morning of 29 April, the Polish authorities began confiscating the 1970s multi-story building of the Russian embassy in Warsaw by force, ordering staff to leave the premises.
The building, used as a high school for the children of diplomats, belongs to the Warsaw city hall, Polish foreign ministry spokesman Łukasz Jasina told AFP, adding that authorities had acted on a bailiff’s order.
Interviewed by the Polish Press Agency (PAP), Jasina cited “an old court ruling” granting the Polish state the ownership of the building at 45 Kielecka Street that for years has been illegally held by the Russian embassy. He added that the building did not have diplomatic status.
Andreev condemned the building’s confiscation, calling the incident a Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations violation. He said the school will continue operating elsewhere at the Russian embassy.
He told TASS that Warsaw had been insistently demanding from Russia the handover of the school’s territory for a whole year. In April 2022, they already seized one of our buildings, so he said the embassy did not rule out that they would do the same to the school.
The ambassador referred to the seizure of a building at 100 Sobieskiego Street near the Russian embassy, dubbed “The Spy Nest” by Warsaw citizens, which housed flats once occupied by the embassy’s employees.
(Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | EURACTIV.pl)
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